Please join for an opening reception for Paul Nudd‘s sixth solo show at Western Exhibitions, the first focusing on his burgeoning ceramics practice, on Friday, November 6, 2026, 5 to 8pm. More information to come.
Please join for an opening reception for Olivia Zubko’s first show at Western Exhibitions, on Friday, September 18, 5 to 8pm. More information to come.
Please join for an opening reception for Richard Hull‘s sixth show at Western Exhibitions, new work in Gallery 1 and a printmaking retrospective in Gallery 2, on Friday, June 12, 2026, 5 to 8pm. More information to come.
Western Exhibitions is thrilled to present our fifth solo show with Marshall Brown, Palaces and Prisons, a two-part exhibition presenting collages from Brown’s new Palaces of Industry series in Gallery 1 and in Gallery 2, never-before-shown works that continue his ongoing Prisons of Invention series. Marshall Brown, an artist and architect, collapses reality and fiction with collage, a loophole between he shared territories of art and architecture. In these Palaces, he builds utopian visions from pure abstraction. In these Prisons, he constructs paradoxes from reality’s ruins. The show opens on Friday, March 27 with a public reception from 5 to 8pm, and will run through May 30, 2026. Gallery hours are Tuesday to Saturday, 11am to 6pm.
In Gallery 1, Palaces of Industry is a new series of large-scale collages on panel that returns to Brown’s earliest influences: the floating geometries and dynamic equilibrium of Suprematism, Constructivism’s photomontage tradition and layering, Giacometti’s surrealist structures, Duchamp’s readymades. He appropriates images from contemporary artists who make architecture their subject, reconstructing them as monumental collages. These are imagined futures inspired by great industrial palaces built at the birth of modernism: the Crystal Palace, factories that housed new collective labor, the production sites that promised transformation. White space floods the compositions. Fragments hover. The scale creates immersive worlds you can step inside—flatness expands into depth. Building utopian space from contemporary art’s fascination with architecture, Brown turns art’s gaze at architecture back on itself. These are not pictures. They are visions.
In Gallery 2, these never-before-shown works continue his ongoing collage-on-paper Prisons of Invention series, named for Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s Carceri d’invenzione. Brown constructs these paradoxical, labyrinthine spaces from fragments of recent architectural photography, just as Piranesi built his imaginary dungeons from the ruins of Rome. Multiple viewpoints collide and diverge within a single composition. Light and shadow emerge from hidden sources. Fragments layer and overlap, creating perspectives that can’t belong to the same space. These are visions of many moments struggling to coexist—each piece holds multiple experiences that refuse to settle into one.
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Marshall Brown is an architect, urbanist, and futurist whose work creates new connections, associations, and meanings among disconnected architectural and urban remnants. His 2022-23 show, The Architecture of Collage at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, was Brown’s first solo museum exhibition and most comprehensive presentation of his collages to date. Works from the show, exploratory essays, and additional pieces are published in a book of the same name. Brown’s work is held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Contemporary Photography and the University Club, both in Chicago. Brown has exhibited at the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale, the 2017 Chicago Architecture Biennial, the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, The Arts Club of Chicago, the Architecture and Design Museum Los Angeles, and in a 10-year survey, Recurrent Visions: The Architecture of Marshall Brown Projects, at the Princeton University School of Architecture. Marshall Brown received his masters degrees at Harvard University. He is a full professor with tenure at the Princeton University School of Architecture, where he directs the Princeton Urban Imagination Center. Marshall Brown lives in Princeton, NJ and Philadelphia, PA.
Western Exhibitions is thrilled to present Spaces for People, Systems for Spaces, a group show about the built environment — cities, buildings, structures, urban planning — featuring 15 artists from across the States who make art about architecture.
Reviews:
New City “Western Exhibitions’ New Show Maps Cities, Bodies and the Spaces Between” by Zara Yost | February 26, 2026
Chicago Reader “Art about architecture” by Cassidy Klein | February 17, 2026
The show opens on January 9, 2026, with a public reception from 5 to 8pm and runs through March 21. Gallery hours are Tuesday to Saturday, 11am to 6pm.
Kim Beck (lives and works in Pittsburgh), a multidisciplinary artist whose work explores the everydayness of disaster, is showing a work from her Woven Roads series — photographs of pavement, potholes and road repairs physically woven together. The piece contains images that have been cut into slices and reconstituted in a new, almost illegible weaving, creating a visual plane that has a visual buzz. The ground becomes a flickering surface dissolving before our eyes.
John Behnke’s (b. 1991, lives and works in Chicago) paintings tell complex stories that combine romantic attitudes toward the natural world with dystopian visions of the near future. Painted from memory, based on tangible places, his cityscapes travel between the surreal and hyperreal. He describes his eerie, fluorescent palette as “paranormal colors” and presents most as being at the time of dusk. Behnke works at his home studio in Oriole Park and at Project Onward, both in Chicago.
Marshall Brown (b. 1973, lives and works in Princeton, NJ) is an architect, urbanist, and futurist whose work creates new connections, associations, and meanings among disconnected architectural and urban remnants. We’ll be showing a piece from his Forgeries series, a growing body of work that responds directly to contemporary art’s portrayals of architecture. In these pieces, Brown dismantles photographs by several contemporary artists and reassembles them to create collages that borrow pictorial strategies from the early modern architect and prolific collagist, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. The Forgeries play a double game. Brown retools Mies’ pictorial flatland as a mirror to reflect contemporary art’s gaze back on itself and constructs new spaces that subvert our attempts to separate the two creative worlds of architecture and art.
Courttney Cooper (b. 1977, lives and works in Cincinnati, OH) draws large elaborate and exuberant maps from his physical and psychological experiences in Cincinnati. Gluing together pieces of found paper from his job at a grocery store, Cooper’s obsessive drawings, rendered with ballpoint pens, map out neighborhoods in his hometown in remarkable detail. Buildings, streets, and conversations are all recorded from memory. Cooper’s work illustrates a sublime moment in time, attempting to understand something as complex as a city. Cooper lives and works in Cincinnati and is an artist member at Visionaries + Voices.
Shir Ende (lives and works in Chicago) is interested in what it would look like if our bodies could become material to build architecture. Ende wants to reposition the choreographer as an architect, enabling them to shape environments by directing movements that define space. Her drawings use a notational system to devise proposals of impossible scores for performances and nonsensical floor plans simultaneously. They imagine a world not limited by gravity and time. Merging flatness and dimensionality, destabilizing the horizon line, alternating perspectives further disorientates the viewer. Ende’s drawings do what a performance cannot: create a record of an articulated space.
Plotted out beforehand using graphite pencil, rulers and protractors, and hand-painted with the illusion of hard-edged precision, Edie Fake’s (b. 1980, Evanston, IL) artistic practice mines the grammar of architecture to carve out space for bodies that have been othered and invalidated by dominant systems of knowledge. Fake’s abstract representations of community form and collapse, cohere and dissipate, reflective of the real experience within queer lives and their ever-shifting constellations, while centering his central concern for the audacity of queer utopian imagining
Using photography, video, notes, and journal texts, Jazmine. (b. 1992, lives and works in Chicago and London) deconstructs and embellishes personal, communal, and social political narratives. Memory, found and fabricated, serves as primary material, while the acts of remembrance inform and shape the processes she employs. In addressing the beauty and failure of collective memory, Jazmine mines, co-creates, and collages archival materials seeking to democratize associated practices, while emphasizing the importance of connection, space, and reimagining the everyday familiar and unknown.
Makayla Lindsay (b. 1995, lives and works in Chicago) is a conceptually driven artist working in performance, sculpture, and video. Drawing from her background as a competitive athlete, her work examines perception, identity, and the cultural forces embedded in bodily movement. Grounded in improvisational and observational gestures, she crafts sculptural arrangements and performance scores that explore our spatial and social relationships to the built environment, emphasizing duration and the shifting role of the audience.
Utilizing fine graphite pencils, pens, and ruler to meticulously render hundreds of constructed lines, R.J. Juguilon’s (b. 1988, lives and works in Chicago) architectural drawings exhibit a thorough consideration of structural minutia. The artist notes, “I really enjoy balance and straight lines. Detail is very important.” R.J.’s architectural work captures the earnest, playful energy of the Windy City.
Aya Nakamura’s (b. 1982, lives and works in Chicago) colored pencil drawings, often on irregularly-shaped handmade paper that she makes in her Chicago studio, are built slowly and through layered applications of colored pencil. Nakamura describes the aesthetic sensibility of these drawings as “magpie,” an attraction to disparate things that compel attention through their distinctiveness or evocative power, and toriawase, a Japanese term referring to the bringing together of varied elements to create a resonant whole. Over the past year, Nakamura’s attention has turned toward features of a home she and her partner have recently moved into, and the human body. What has emerged is a series of drawings that uncovers the uncanny and “creaturely” qualities shared by the built and the bodily, allowing one to stand in for the other.
Brian Petrone (lives and works in Evanston, IL) is an architect, painter, & sculptor whose work deals with the intersection of architecture, painting, and sculpture. Trained as an architect, Petrone employs the processes that go into making a building – forming mass, sculpting space, manipulating light – to create art. Interested in the analogy of the city as a living organism, cities grow, contract, evolve, and change. His sculptures that hang on the wall like paintings include volumes that burst out of the two-dimensional plane, suggesting organic or crystalline growth, mirroring the growth of the city.
Deb Sokolow’s (b. 1974, lives and works in Chicago) semi-abstract schematic drawings focus on the idiosyncratic aspects of (mostly) fictitious built environments while hinting at the concealed agendas and social engineering involved in the design and use of corporate, institutional and domestic architecture.
Ryan Standfest (b. 1974, lives and works in Detroit) is an artist and publisher. Termite-like, with a disregard for illusionism and naturalism, Standfest erodes notions of certainty to bore down into idealism and disillusionment. Uninterested in symbolism, the structures in his paintings depicted are exactly what they are: a building, a tree, a cloud, a rock, a hole, a road. However, these forms populate a rigid, tightly constructed space, not unlike a stage set, where their seemingly inert situational relationships yield a tension between aspiration and forfeiture, order and disorder, meaning and meaninglessness. Indecisiveness is staged in existential, emotionally reticent landscapes where doubt and irresolution are reinforced.
Cathrine Whited (lives and works in Cincinnati) makes deadpan drawings that transform mundane and everyday items into revered icons. Her charming, slyly simple drawings combine image and text to document and archive the world around her, with subjects ranging from household objects to food to cartoon characters. Her process starts with making a list — “What’s in my fridge” or “Things that make up a sandwich” — as a jumping off point. Each item on the list is drawn with graphite and colored pencil, distilled to its essential elements, and labeled underneath, akin to a Victorian-era scientific journals and classifications of nature. Whited is meticulous in this process as an index of erasure is often visible, marking her desire to render the image, and especially the text, perfectly. Her subject-centered renderings are neat, clean, and void of background and are a vehicle for viewers to isolate, experience, and analyze our collective everyday interaction with often overlooked objects and culture that surrounds us.
Born in 1961, Marvin Young is a lifelong resident of Chicago’s South Side who joined Arts of Life’s South Side studio in 2024. Intensely observant and drawing constantly, his works exist as an expression and record of both his community and personal experience over the decades. These quick yet detailed representations of figures and urban landscapes, both imagined and remembered, capture his hometown in a singular voice. His landscapes include elaborately rendered vintage walk-ups, brownstones, brick 4-flats, and residential high-rises—often boasting distinct cornices, bay windows, chimneys, and stoops—typical of his South Side neighborhood. These architectural facades are surrounded by blue skies, traffic signs, brightly hued vehicles (recalling 70s and 80s models), and arching streetlights.
Using his iPad as a reference material, Joe Zaldivar (b. 1989, lives and works in Los Angeles) creates aerial view maps of locations around the world, often autobiographical, as well as street level renditions of the same locations using the Street View function of Google Maps. The resulting works, which combine technology and perspectival architectural drawing in a style reminiscent of cartoon animation, twist time and space both spatially and conceptually. Zaldivar has been an artist with the Tierra Art Studios in Los Angeles since 2011
Western Exhibitions is thrilled to present our sixth solo show with Lilli Carré, a two-part exhibition: in Gallery 1 we will present Fallen Anvils, featuring ceramic sculpture and hand-painted acetate cels and in Gallery 2, the animated film Evacuations. Fallen Anvils + Evacuations will open on Friday, November 7 and runs through December 20. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 11am to 6pm. The gallery will be accessible by appointment during the holiday break.
The exhibition is anchored around the animated short film Evacuations (2025). Painted formless figures haunt recent photos of emptied-out public spaces. As cel-animated smear frames, they perform various repetitive acts in these settings, with movements expressing a helpless, frantic energy felt in our current moment. The film is a string of varied evacuations – earth and organs are emptied, situations are fled. The figures become displaced from their locations, as their environments dissolve and their printed record evaporates.
Gallery 1 holds 20 individual cels chosen from the film out of over 1000 hand-painted animation frames, certain frozen instants of transitional smear frame energy. Throughout the room sit ceramic mutations of classical anvil forms, inspired by the heavy, hammered cartoon object known for falling unexpectedly out of the sky. Hand-drawn lenticular elements are embedded into the anvils, adding unexpected life and motion into their weight.
Lilli Carré’s interdisciplinary creative practice employs a wide range of media, including experimental animation, drawing, comics, weaving, and ceramic sculpture. Recent works focus on perceived misbehaviors, bodily communication, and the grotesque. She is particularly interested in the open-ended possibilities and histories of the animated body – simultaneously physical and virtual, free of expectations or fixed form.
Representations of the feminine form and animated body throughout history are a source of fascination for Carré. Her images look at ways in which people interact with and inhabit cartoon bodies that appear to feel no pain or touch, and our relationship to separate, virtual selves. In addition to animation, her drawings and ceramic sculptures explore mutation, tactility, and malleability, translating cartoon logic from the virtual to the physical world through material disobedience.
Evacuations was recently included in the Ottawa International Animation Festival, winning Best Sound Design. From the jury: “Sound creates the physical experience in film, moving from its source directly to the body. Our selection employs sound playfully juxtaposed with image and movement to create a whole stronger than its individual parts.” Evacuation also won a Special Jury Award for Short Film at the 2025 New Chitose Airport International Animation Festival.
Lilli Carré is a recipient of a 2024 Guggenheim Fellowship in Film-Video. Her solo shows include the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Columbus Museum of Art in Ohio, Museo Internazionale e Biblioteca della Musica di Bologna in Italy, 150 Media Stream, Chicago and Western Exhibitions. Her work is held in the collections of The National Gallery of Art and The Library of Congress, both in Washington, D.C.; The Booth School of Business, University of Chicago; The Progressive Art Collection, Mayfield Village, Ohio; and Thomas J. Watson Library, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Her animated films have been shown in festivals throughout the US and abroad, including the Sundance Film Festival; Annecy; the Edinburgh International Film Festival; Ottawa International Animation Festival; 25FPS; European Media Arts Festival; the Ann Arbor Film Festival; and the International Film Festival in Rotterdam. Carré co-founded the Eyeworks Experimental Animation Screening Series in 2010, which is held annually in Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York. She has several published graphic novels with Fantagraphics and her work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Best American Comics and Best American Nonrequired Reading. Artist residencies include MacDowell, Yaddo, and Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts. She received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and MFA from Northwestern University. Carré is represented by Western Exhibitions in Chicago and she lives and works in Los Angeles, where she teaches in the Experimental Animation program at CalArts.
Western Exhibitions is thrilled to present our first solo show with Simone Mantellassi, Carpeting In the Kitchen Incorporated. Mantellassi’s paintings on paper and sculptural tableaus poke fun at the tragicomedy life, tackling subjects ranging from two former American presidents, Captain Ahab, Ronald McDonald and the axis of evil, to the ancient superheroes of Ellenic Greece and the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens. Inspired by a trove of artists and filmmakers including David Lynch, Alejandro Jorodowsky, Josephine Halvorson, and Philip Guston, Mantellassi works in an aesthetic fully his own; mixing comic book storytelling, surrealism and formalism into a distinct visual language. The show opens in Gallery 2 at Western Exhibitions in Chicago on September 12 with a public reception from 5 to 8pm. and runs through November 1. Gallery hours are Tuesday to Saturday, 11am to 6pm.
His works on paper echo the multi-perspective quality of comic book pages and surrealist art as overlapping storylines and viewpoints cohabitate in one plane. Nonsensical alignments of objects and narratives intermingle with a humorous, dreamy color palette, often paired with poetically off-kilter titles in his second language, English. Pastries (real and fake), trees, pipes, body parts, treehouses, scenes from the kitchen, shoes and trash from the woods all expand and contract between resolution and dissolution, animating a dreamlike quality where highly vivid thoughts remain incomplete and half-formed.
From certain drawings, Mantellassi creates three-dimensional sculptures—compact, diorama-like compositions composed of everyday materials in plexiglas casing. The humor and irony of his work is made concretely manifest in these objects, whose crumply, crude surfaces and “imperfect” finishes are precisely where the work culminates most fully; stage-sets for the tragicomedy of life where narrative and its artifice are on display simultaneously.
In The Status Of Things As They Have Been an irregularly contoured rectangular slab of pink styrofoam leans back in a clear plastic vitrine, with white overalls painted on it, a torso shape as a stand in for the artist, perhaps. The title of the work is painted cartoonishly on each side of the slab, with quirky sculptures made from commonplace materials inhabit the space. On the back of the vitrine the Mantellassi scrawled on a painted banner “I DIDN’T LIKED RONALD REAGAN THE FIRST TIME AROUND ANYWAY” as a discrete viewer gazes up at it from the bottom right of the plane.
A similar pink slab forms the central image in the work on paper Ronald McDonald And The Axis of Evil On Frakt Boulevard P.M. Instead of being adorned by overalls, this shape serves as the ground for a tumbling tableau of Guston-like forms: boots, human faces, headstones, beer cans, trees hiding fat pixies in their leaf clouds, street signs and hats, punctuated by a head of a pink man at the bottom of the page exclaiming in a comic book balloon “FUCK! IT’S THE AXIS OF EVIL.” We are particularly enamored with another sculpture in vitrine titled “Piece of Skin From My Forehead Enlarged Quite A Bit.” Descriptions defy it, you’ll have to see it in person.
A self-taught artist, born and raised in Florence, Italy in 1971, Simone Mantellassi moved to the United States in 2002 and lives and works in Gilbertsville, New York, in the Western Catskills. His work has been shown at and is in the collection of the Buffalo AKG Art Museum. Other exhibitions include the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, Buller Space in New York, NADA New York and KIPNZ in Walton, NY.
Simone Mantellassi featured on Where They Create: https://wheretheycreate.com/2025/09/15/simone-mantellassi/
Western Exhibitions is pleased to present The Gloaming, Journie Cirdain’s second solo show with the gallery. Cirdain’s large allegorical drawings exist at the intersection of the human and animal, internal and external, magic and reality, and ultimately, life and death. The show opens on September 12 with a public reception and runs through November 1. Gallery hours are Tuesday to Saturday, 11am to 6pm.
Another word for twilight is gloaming, which influences Cirdain’s almost exclusive use of a crepuscular value range of graphite. She meticulously renders moments of tension between the human and non-human, reimagining art historical subjects (still lives, nudes, and luxury items) as living participants in an enmeshed environment. With a film director’s focus on drama and a romantic flirtation with the macabre, her drawings betray an exquisite attention to light surface as a chandelier becomes an environment for cobwebs; a spiderweb glistens like crystal; a bouquet hangs next to the site of its extraction; an environment shows beheaded tulips. Her drawings engage with ideas about living and dying as entangled beings.
Journie Nikala Cirdain was born in 1993 in Santa Rosa, California. In 2017, she received her BA in Liberal Arts in the Great Books at St. John’s College and in 2022, an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has shown in exhibitions nationally and internationally, including The Green Gallery in Milwaukee, Elmhurst Art Museum in Illinois, A Gallery in Seattle, and in Chicago at Goldfinch and Patient Info. Cirdain lived and worked in Chicago for the past five years and is now on her way to Queens.
Review: New City. “Journie Cirdain Captures the Twilight Hour in “The Gloaming” by Annette LePique
Article: Hyperallergic. “10 Exhibitions to See in Chicago this Fall” by Natalie Jenkins
Review: NewCity. Linguistic Gymnastics, by Samuel Schwindt, July 16, 2025
Western Exhibitions is thrilled to present our first solo show with Nanako Kono with paintings, drawings, prints, comics and collages that investigate miscommunication. She is inspired by the comic strip, employing intrinsic elements of that format — panels, speech balloons, animated objects, recurring characters, text — in her humorous paintings. Her process of learning English as a second language sparked an interest in translations and semiotics, leading to the realization that the signs, symbols, and words we choose often fail to convey intended meanings to others. Taking visual and material cues from the Chicago Imagist tradition, Kono’s work explores a playful new way of communication. The show opens on Friday, June 13 with a public reception from 5 to 8pm and runs through August 16. Gallery hours are Tuesday to Saturday, 11am to 6pm.
Kono’s focus on multi-lingual miscommunication led her to consider other contributing factors of the dynamic: power imbalances and non-literal language use. Kono uses flatness, transparency, double-sidedness, and thickness of acrylic sheets in her work to convey the multifaceted nature of emotions and perceptions, and the indirect exchange of feelings with others through imaginary borders. Inspired by the Japanese concepts of “tatemae” (public façade) and “honne” (true feelings), as well as manga speech bubbles, Kono’s paintings explore the dichotomy and ambiguity between the external persona and the inner self, revealing the layers of complexity in human emotions and interactions.
Nanako Kono was born in 1999 in Tokyo, Japan. She moved from Japan to Las Vegas, Nevada in 2016. She earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts with an emphasis on painting, drawing, and printmaking and a minor in Art History at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas in 2022 and a Master of Fine Arts degree in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2025.
Review: NewCity. Communal Endeavor, by Johnathan Bonfiglio, July 14, 2025
Western Exhibitions is thrilled to present Folk Methods with Spatial Problems a group show curated by Shannon Rae Stratton featuring quilts and ceramics by Henry Crissman, Chris Edwards, Lauren Gregory, Virginia Rose Torrence. Folk Methods and Spatial Problems emerges from the experiences at Ox-Bow School of Art and Artists’ Residency in Saugatuck, Michigan with four artists who co-teach in ceramics (Crissman and Torrence) and quilting (Edwards and Gregory) and continue the legacy of craft as a collaborative, communal endeavor where knowledge and skills are shared alongside the conversation and innovation that solidifies community. The show opens on Friday, June 13 with a public reception and runs through August 16. Gallery hours are Tuesday to Saturday, 11am to 6pm.
Craftsmanship is a knowledge base that has always been created and circulated through the interdependent and collaborative space of the workshop, atelier and/or studio. While this fact is universal, across history and geography, each summer, craft pedagogy persists on the summer campus at Ox-Bow.
Chris Edwards and Lauren Gregory have co-taught “Soft Compositions” for over three years, Henry Crissman and Virginia Torrence, in addition to a teaching partnership, have established the Ceramics School, a workshop and residency in Detroit. Inevitably these close working and teaching relationships make impressions on the studio practice of collaborators, whether conceptually, formally, or materially, creating the kind of art and craft lineage that results in regional “schools” or “styles” that become more evident in historical time than in the immediate present.
In Folk Methods and Spatial Problems, evidence of shared approaches to aesthetics and humor, the depiction/construction of volume and space and commentary on value(s) abound, resulting in a group of work that showcases the joy and irreverence that is at home in craft media. The tactics of craft— to make something that can relate to the body and function — is a place for re-orientation to the world. Or maybe more of a re-minder of the world: that it is through the intimate use of objects that we are re-embodied – which at present, feels urgent. If we are to (re)build the skills of interdependence and compassion, we need a re-embodying that takes us out of the screen and back into community.
Henry James Haver Crissman’s multi-faceted community-based holistic art practice is rooted in clay— building on its expressive, vernacular, and communal capacities — and manifests as objects, installation, kiln making, video and performance work, community projects and curation, teaching, facilitation, and space making. He lives and works in Hamtramck, Michigan where he co-founded and co-directs Ceramics School, a community ceramics studio and artist residency in a connected rowhouse and storefront. Crissman is an adjunct professor at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit and has been co-teaching the wood-fired ceramic courses at Oxbow School of Art since 2023. Crissman earned a BFA from the College for Creative Studies in Detroit in 2012, and an MFA at Alfred University in 2015.
Chris Edwards is an artist and Licensed Clinical Social Worker living and working in Chicago, working primarily in quilting, ceramics, and puff paint. He received his Master of Fine Arts in Painting and Drawing from SAIC in 2011 and his Master of Social Work from the University of Iowa in 2014 while completing a term of service with Americorps. He lives in Chicago with his husband, dog, and two cats. He has exhibited work at Western Exhibitions in Chicago, Ox-Bow House in Saugatuck, Wrong Marfa in Marfa, Elephant Gallery in Nashville as well as Adds Donna, Tusk, LVL3, Oggi Gallery, Dreamboat, and Julius Caesar, all in Chicago.
Lauren Gregory is a multidisciplinary artist and educator born whose practice bridges painting, animation, and quilting, exploring themes of storytelling and the interplay between tradition and technology. Her GIFs, looped video installations, and animated shorts have been screened at MoMA PS1, the New Museum, MOCA Los Angeles, and film festivals worldwide. Her animation and directing work includes commissions from the Washington Post and music videos for Leonard Cohen, Norah Jones, James Taylor, Sarah McLachlan, and Toro y Moi. Gregory teaches animation at Parsons School of Design, quilting at Ox-Bow School of Art, and is a graduate student mentor at Belmont University. She received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and lives and works in Nashville, Tennessee, where she is represented by Red Arrow Gallery.
Virginia Rose Torrence earned her BFA in Crafts from the College for Creative Studies in 2013 and her MFA in Ceramics from Alfred University in 2016. Her work has been exhibited at venues including Trinosophes (Detroit), Wasserman Projects (Detroit), and The White Page Gallery (Minneapolis), among others. Based in Hamtramck, MI, Torrence co-founded Ceramics School, a community ceramics studio focused on accessible art education, where she teaches, manages the studio, and makes pottery and sculpture. Torrence has been co-teaching the wood-fired ceramic courses at Oxbow School of Art since 2023. Torrence works as a facilitator, teacher, sculptor and potter. These practices often intersect and are a reflection of her passion for care, accessibility, and community nourishment.
Shannon Rae Stratton is a writer, artist and independent curator. With a foundation in studio craft and painting and over 20 years experience organizing exhibitions, events and other cultural platforms, Stratton’s practice is a culmination of diffuse experiments and experiences borne out of an insatiable curiosity for the why and the how the world is processed by artists and makers. She co-founded Threewalls, an artist-run space in Chicago, IL, in 2003 where she was Director until 2015. From 2015-2019 she was chief curator at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, NY where she organized Roger Brown: Virtual Still Lifes and Tanya Aguiñiga: Craft and Care, among others. Her writing includes the catalog for the Roger Brown show and Faith Wilding: Fearful Symmetries published by Intellect Books, which is available at the gallery. She is currently Executive Director of Ox-Bow School of Art and Artists’ Residency in Saugatuck, MI and teaches at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she now serves as the Director of the Post-Baccalaureate Certificate Program in Painting and Drawing.
Review: Artforum. Sukaina Kubba, Critic’s Pick, by Julian Stern, May 8, 2025
Article: Chicago Reader. Art beyond the EXPO Chicago booths by Micco Caporale, April 16, 2025
Western Exhibitions is pleased to present our first show with Sukaina Kubba, Textile Museum. Sukaina Kubba’s work is strongly rooted in material and cultural research, storytelling, and drawing connections as she traces and translates textile designs, drawings, and archives in hand-drawn objects made using 3D printing filaments. For this show, Kubba’s new hand-drawn filament sculptures trace, through deep research, the history of lace making from its handmade roots through the industrial revolution of machine-made textiles to the use of synthetic materials being used today. Please join us for an opening reception on Friday, April 18, from 5 to 8pm. The show runs through June 7 and gallery hours are Tues-Sat, 11am to 6pm.
In Textile Museum, Sukaina Kubba presents new works inspired by lace artefacts from the digital collection of the Textile Museum of Canada. The artefacts that inspire these new hand-drawn filament sculptures were collected from Europe, North America and South Asia and consist of a variety of textile objects such as: handkerchiefs, lace edging, fragments, a lace kit case and a false shirt. Made between the early 19th century and mid 20th century, the lace objects are mostly hand-embroidered but some display early methods of industrial production, such as mechanical loom weaving and machine sewing. Textile Museum is the first in a series of works in which Kubba researches and references lace making as a craft that has shifted from a product of artisan, family based and cottage industry labour using agricultural materials such as cotton and linen, through a transformation in the industrial revolution using jacquard looms and sewing machines, to the synthetic revolution with the use of nylons and other petrochemical materials as well as minimized labour.
Inspired by a rug she was researching during a residency in Chile in 2022, Kubba shifted her multidisciplinary practice to include 3d monofilament pens to make sculptural drawings and began experimenting with several printmaking techniques. From the artist:
I wanted to have a drawing that has no backing, like a drawing that you can lift off and put anywhere, on a wall or somewhere else. For this project, all the works are colored 3D filament. I’m really looking at the texture. Some of the works really follow, almost like the thread of the lace. It’s not quite one to one, but I’m really trying to work much more with texture rather than filling in color or lines, or tracing lines. I’m trying to mimic that materiality of lace sheer fabrics with it, which has really been quite a challenge, just trying to go into detail and work with thinner and thicker lines.
The title of show plays an ode to Toronto-based Textile Museum of Canada that opened in 1975 and is undergoing a temporary closure and an uncertain future due to increasingly precarious arts funding. Since 2020 Kubba has used the online and physical Collection at the Museum extensively to research, draw and explore textile artefacts.
Download interview with Kubba about this body of work here (pdf)
Sukaina Kubba is an Iraqi-born Toronto-based multi-disciplinary artist whose work is rooted in material and cultural research, material experimentation, storytelling and drawing connections. Kubba’s work has been included in Toronto at Patel Brown (2024), Greater Toronto Art Triennial at MOCA (2024), Mercer Union SPACE Billboard Commission (2023-24), the plumb (2023), The Next Contemporary (2023), Art Gallery of Ontario (2019), Aga Khan Museum (2017); and in Scotland at Dundee Contemporary Arts (2024), Centre for Contemporary Art, Glasgow (2016), Glasgow International (2016 and 2014) and Kendall Koppe, Glasgow (2013). She has upcoming exhibitions at Patel Brown, Montreal (Feb 2025) and Carleton University Art Gallery, Ottawa (Jan 2026). Kubba has recently completed residencies at the International Studio and Curatorial Program, New York and La Wayaka Current, Chile. She is a sessional lecturer in Visual Studies at the University of Toronto, and was previously a curator and lecturer at The Glasgow School of Art (2013–2018).